CUSTOMER STORY:

How a Kickstarter campaign saved with great shipping rates and simplified customs & duties

With Kevin Haughin - CTO

$1000s

Saved with Shipping Discounts

765

Orders Monthly

0

Customs & Duties Paid by Customers

43

Countries

SAM labs

SAM Labs is a London internet of things startup with a very successful Kickstarter campaign. They focus on helping get ideas to product via wireless building blocks, think smart legos. Engineering becomes fun and transparent, SAM helps you get to materialize your imagination.

challenge

SAM Labs' team is full of engineering genius however they had never shipped such a large amount of packages all in one go. With only 4 different SKUs, they knew that it was going to be repetitive and wanted minimize picking mistakes. They had heard from their other crowdfunding friends of some of the pitfalls like customs and duties, shipping address data management and surprisingly high postage costs. Doing a mail merge which they could easily do as engineers wasn't good enough as it only got the address on the shipping label.

Solution

Using Simple Merchant, SAM didn't have to worry about the shipping details. He was able to leverage large shipping discounts using UPS Mail Innovations for US packages, Royal Mail business rates for the UK and four other carriers for the rest of the world packages. They didn't have to sign up or haggle with carriers to get better shipping rates as Simple Merchant already had the relationships.

“We had never shipped this many packages to so many different countries. We used Simple Merchant's rates and saved.”

The best part was sorting out customs and duties for customers. SAM didn't want to aggravate customers with a separate bill and made sure that the delivery process was smooth. There have been too many unhappy customer stories around product delays and on top of that a surprise bill waiting for them when they go to pick up their crowdfunded product.

"Simple Merchant helped us through the entire shipping process. As we had prepaid, our customers had no problems with customs or duties. There were no surprises or shipping delays."

Picking and packing 765 packages is not easy but Simple Merchant printed all the shipping labels for SAM. By batch processing the shipping labels, Simple Merchant saved SAM tens of hours in picking and packing. Simple Merchant automatically grouped the 4 SKUs so they could focus on completing one SKU at a time, in descending count order and with no mistakes.

"We had to pick, pack and ship 765 Kickstarter packages. But Simple Merchant as a team have shipped over 250,000 packages. We didn't have to make mistakes and leveraged Simple Merchant's learnings instead.”